02.22.08

A few moments ago, someone expressed some thoughts about Mono as an issue that revolves around software patents. He was referring to Mark Shuttleworth's response to our query. We wish to share a bit of correspondence which is only an hour old. It should be attributed to Beranger, who has permitted us to share this in public.

Roy,

I suppose your fight against Mono has [at least slightly] different motivations than mine; whereas your stance seems to be [strongly enough] related to patents and other risks coming from Microsoft, I am primarily focused on some other concerns.

First, I think that BSD and Linux and generally open-source operating systems & software were invented for providing people with freedom, and freedom means “out of the Microsoft Konzentrationslager”.

From this standpoint, it’s obvious that people don’t want to get “blessed” with Microsoft technology anymore. Sure thing, many Linux users will consider that they need Samba connectivity, some other would require NTFS-3g, but this is not only optional, it’s required in some cases because they are “de facto” technologies in some environments, and “interoperability” is at times just that.

Microsoft .NET is however more than a protocol (Samba) or a filesystem format (NTFS): it’s a whole new concept that changes almost everything: it invents a new language (C#) midway between C++ and Java; it creates a unified CLR; by introducing the CLR as a runtime, it introduces a new layer of abstractedness between a binary and the operating system, just like Java does.

Note however that the Java hype didn’t managed to impose silly small Java programs on everyone’s desktop; instead, the best use of Java is for large enterprise applications, and several Java application servers are available for that.

“With .NET, everybody started to write silly small C# desktop gizmos.”With .NET, everybody started to write silly small C# desktop gizmos. And then it came Miguel de Icaza to clone it as Mono, and many people thought it was good this way: “Hey, if I can run this on Linux, I can get rid of Windows!”

It is all wrong. Notice the proliferation of all kind of Gtk# applets and small applications. If Miguel’s Mono were created for interoperability, for replacing .NET, and for cross-platform compatibility with regards to serious business approaches (i.e. to replace Windows 2003 Server with a Linux/BSD/Solaris box), then ASP.NET should have been made the #1 priority, not the silly GTK+ bindings for Mono!

Instead of creating freedom by making possible the replacement of a Windows Server with a Linux/BSD box, Miguel’s Mono is doing exactly the opposite: it creates an unhealthy dependence of a Microsoft technology!

If there are really people in this world who genuinely believe that the Microsoft .NET technology is so very much revolutionary that we should really be using it, as if Microsoft were the one and only company that would save the IT from the lack of vision and lack of future it might have had, then… why aren’t they using the original .NET platform? Is it only for the price? Are they feeling better to use the open-source Mono, whose compatibility with .NET is mediocre at best?

I would very much like to see a big ASP.NET application running on Mono, and without modifications. But no, what I can see is an increasing number of Gtk# applications that are making a lot of GNOME users dependent of the (otherwise unnecessary) Mono framework.

Are we really running Linux on our computers, or are we running a mix of Linux and “Windows under disguise”?Maybe Python (PyGtk) is less effective than C# (Gtk#). Does it mean we should rewrite everything Python in C#? And that we should thank Microsoft for it has had “the vision”?

I know that .EXE and .DLL are simply conventions for naming PE files. Nevertheless, before Mono there wasn’t any way to see such files on a Linux/BSD box other than because you wanted to run a genuine Windows applications through an emulator. Nowadays, we’re more and more impregnated with those brilliant DOS/Windows concepts that made Microsoft so popular.

Are we really running Linux on our computers, or are we running a mix of Linux and “Windows under disguise”?

Instead of the bravado self-sufficient attitude of “Hey, you can run on Linux the same stuff you can run on Windows, so we win!” (not entirely accurate, as Mono doesn’t perfectly match .NET), we should rather be aware that in the long run the winner is Microsoft: its concepts and technologies will be present not only on Windows systems, but on no matter what systems.

Maybe people shouldn’t *hate* Microsoft that much. But should they *love* when F/LOSS people are embracing Microsoft technologies and they’re also imposing them to a desktop environment like GNOME, who was born for the licensing fears with regards to KDE?

Patents and licenses are completely different matters; but giving credits to Microsoft is a little too much. What will be the next step: will Novell reimplement the whole Vista, supposing it would be covered by a few ECMA standards? And how about NTFS, why isn’t Linux adopting it if reimplementing Microsoft’s projects is the right thing to do?

I can choose to send DOC files to people who can’t open other kind of documents, and I definitely want to be able to read such files when I receive them. But again, this is only a file format for a document; when I will see that my Linux box is using EXE files to give me the information I need (no, I don’t use Tomboy), then I will know that Microsoft is never going to die.

Mark Shuttleworth is seeing Mono only from the legal side: non-important patent risks, not more than with the rest of a Linux system, so why worry. He is a business person, and the principles guiding him are not the same that are guiding RMS for instance.

I am so very amazed that open-source people (once again, I’ll mention RMS) are not bothered at all by the cloning of a Microsoft platform. UNIX was not supposed to mimic anything. We’re living hard times, where common sense is gone.

Best wishes,
Radu

My personal response to this is perhaps worth adding as well. From what I can gather (it is somewhat of a speculation, so be warned in advance), Richard Stallman is not too happy about Mono, but he does not make too much noise about it, either. Smears are risky and Microsoft (sometimes the BSDs too) attack him whenever they get a chance. So, be careful what you read and also believe about his stance. █

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36 Comments

Beranger is right of course. Whilst FOSS can survive patent attacks by rewrites, it becomes a lot more painful the more there is to rewrite (which is what RMS warned us about)

Another valid point he makes is the spread of MS mono-culture (pun intended) If at the end of the day everyone uses something that for all intents and purposes is Windows with a FOSS-technology implementation then Microsoft really has won.

This wouldn’t be so bad if all MS tech truly was the paragon of information technology but it isn’t, not by a long shot (I remember once reading something from Linux kernel-mailing list about the thread implementations…apparently there was some influence from how NT does them and some developers were miffed by the fact. Torvalds, quite rightly, pointed out that Linux should use the best solutions, no matter who has come up with them. However, like I said, I’m not 100% certain I remember the matter correctly…)

Rather than try to win market-share by catering to Windows users/developers we should be proud of our UNIXy heritage and strive for our own identity in a world increasingly more open, hopefully one day free.

In the end, what need is there for highly integrated environments/applications when there are open standards with free implementations? UNIX’s modular approach wins in the end (aa-and back to optimism, it’s a beautiful day outside…)

Rather than try to win market-share by catering to Windows users/developers we should be proud of our UNIXy heritage and strive for our own identity in a world increasingly more open, hopefully one day free.

Riddle yourself this: which might we wish to ‘copy’? Mac OS X (Leopard) or Windows Vista? Mind the review from PC World, which was published yesterday, I suspect. Vista got canned, Ubuntu did well and Mac OS X was praised. Does this indicated that what you call UNIX-type systems are inferior to grossly-advertised Microsoft sophistications, many of which are catchup work (e.g. sudo -> UAC)?

Why copy anything (actually, any existing system)? Use the best solution possible. If this means copying eg. Mac OS X when it comes to ease-of-use, then so be it, or Windows for that matter (assuming there is anything there copy these days…) or better yet, implement something from the research departments that never made it to mainstream systems. Pie-menus being my favourite example. Superior but never implemented anywhere (except games, the user-interface testing labs du jour) because box-list menus have such historical inertia.

We can be “realists” and cater out-dated paradigms from the 80′s to a large user base excepting a look-and-feel similar to mainstream OSs (Mac as well as Windows) or we can be “idealists” and bring out our own UNIXy identity for people who are ready to embrace the 21st century. We’ll see who gets the last laugh…

GNU/Linux thrives in diversity (WMs, DEs and whatnot), so I’m sure that all paradigms will be /available/ for those demanding them rather than be forced as ‘standard’. Consider radical paradigms such as the ones introduced in Metisse.

Since I am not a programer; I can not say much about Mono nor any technical issues, but I can say that RMS fought and fight for free software freedom…..

He is every day doing heavy work for free software freedom, every day he has lot of things in mind, he can not do everything but he almost does.

“…………….I am so very amazed that open-source people (once again, I’ll mention RMS) are not bothered at all by the cloning of a Microsoft platform. UNIX was not supposed to mimic anything. We’re living hard times, where common sense is gone.”

There was an attempt to make Gobuntu Mono-free, but the guy who pushed for this left the project, so I don’t know where things stand. Any KDE- or Xfce-based distribution should not have dependencies on Mono.

In a rushed response I phrased this rather badly. let me say it differently.

I am shocked to find that the very same company that compares Linux/FOSS/GPL to a cancer is actively participating in the development of that ‘cancer’. It gives it various powers inside the group which is supposedly a rival. Let me be more specific.

There have been examples in the past where proxy wars enabled one company to be using another (rival) to attack another or to have it serve another (or self). This is common.

A company or a project is driven only by the people who run the show, not by something such as a constitution. As such, I worry to find that Paul Maritz, a very predatory Microsoft mind (with history to show this such as the statement about “cutting Netscape’s air supply”) has just become a top executive at VMWare, a Microsoft rival.

For the same reason I worry about Microsoft insiders in Nokia intercepting Ogg Vorbis and Theora (more on this shortly) and Microsoft employees in Google apparently doing their thing. We saw what happened in XenSource. Yahoo is another one that is under siege at the moment.

We need something better than C++ for applications development, and right now. I looked at all the alternatives, and C# is the best there is, with Python/IronPython for scripting. In particular, Java and Objective-C don’t cut it (and neither, for that matter, does KDE).

If you want something different, roll up your sleeves and put in the necessary work. But endless complaining isn’t going to work.

Having to get people “kind of addicted” so that Microsoft can “collect some time in the next decade” (Gates reference)

I see the same patterns in Mono, which Microsoft views as its IPR, regardless of your personal views on IPR. Do not underestimate the power of Washington and Brussels lobbyists, let alone the influence of a Foundation that invests in political candidates through their pet charities.

I’d feel safe about Mono only if Larry Lessig ran for president and got reelected for a lifetime.

and read up on it. Compiles to native, runs at C/C++ speeds, has a bunch of bindings, garbage collection, and is fully buzzword compliant. Of course, it doesn’t run in a 100 MB vm, but what…

If you want something different, try Perl, Python, OCaml, Clean, Haskell, ML, Lisp, Scheme, Erlang, Pike, Ruby, BETA, Ada, Free Pascal, or any of a huge number of alternatives to C# out there.

If you think you need a vm to write software, you are ignorant. If you think C# is the best language because it supports generics, you need to study the alternatives. Nothing in C# is new, nothing is particularly inventive.

Learn to code in C. Write your own compiler. Write your own parser. Then help the Parrot people out – see if Larry (Wall) needs a hand. Or talk to the guys behind Clean – they are short on money (low salaries) and could need a hand on developing their i/o library. Or how about lending the X.org guys a hand? What’s with all the “hands”? You’ve got two – use them. Don’t know C yet? Well, what are you waiting for! Linus does it, so can you.

And, if performance isn’t #1 issue, then Python (w/ PyGtk for instance) does quite well for writing applications (even on Mac OS X with PyObjectC)

And thats just in answer to the disparaging remarks about those languages. As Miks quite nicely pointed out, there’s a plethora of others to look at. Let Windows developers write Windows applications with C# if they like, we as Roy quite nicely put it, have a choice (of so many better languages in this instance)

Bear in mind that a common line of arguments you’ll find used by Mono developers is that Java sucks and .NET is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Not only is this unhelpful, but it’s also easily perceived as effective Microsoft marketing and praise.

Below is a quick draft of a piece I wrote for a blog I’m finally getting around to setting up – “You’ve gotta have a blog!”. It’s about the argument that .NET is the greatest thing since sliced bread…

————————————————————
“.NET – the (not so) new religion”

My absolute favorite of comedians, George Carlin – the most to-the-point guy, who, by the way, also does naration for children’s DVDs(!) where he sounds just the nice guy he is, has this to say about the phrase “the greatest thing since sliced bread”:

“So, this is it? A couple of hundred thousand years [of evolution of the human race] – ‘sliced bread’?! [...] Even a lava lamp, to me, is greater than sliced bread. What’s so great about sliced bread? You’ve got a knife, you’ve got a loaf of bread…slice the f*¤%#ng thing, and get on with your life!”

Now, this guy, arguably, has a way with words; an ability to put into perspective the things we take for granted. And he has an important point to make, not only with his musings on the things we say: Its about the repeated patterns we practice but aren’t really in control of. And control, of course, is what it’s all about.

First things first:

To me, .NET is a religion, with all that being a religion entails. It’s as popular and as easy to establish as any other religion is, in a society where most people are brought up to be self-centered. And self-centered we most certainly are- brought up or not. Religion just plays on this, exagerates it and makes it so pronounced an attribute of human nature, that we cannot but live by it. Here’s the deal:

In any country of the western world, the average citizen honestly believes that he or she is special; that is YOU I’m talking about, be you religious or not. The modern marketing machines, of which the establised, organized religions are perhaps the most effective representatives, cater to your need to feel SPECIAL.

Thus, you believe that YOUR life out of roughly 6 billion, in one country out of close to 200, on one planet out of possibly trillions, around one star out of definitely trillions, in one rather insignificant part of the Milky Way, which is one out of an estimated 500 billion galaxies, in one remote part of the universe – that THIS life is SO special that SOMEONE who is larger than EVERYTHING (this “god” thing) actually took the time to care about YOU.

It’s anthropocentric to the MAX, and it’s the joke of all times!

But the same people will cast their vote on anything that makes them feel special, and in the US, this includes ITEMS. The golden calf from the “good” book is old news, but all we’ve done is substitute the old “primitive” form of item praise with the praise of technological “wonders”. Anyone that actually knows his stuff (anyone who cares to take a look or two – ask a question or two), and doesn’t have that need for security in feeling special – that “there is pre-determined, special purpose to my life”, will recognize such practice for what it is: Established to fulfill a basic human need; the need to be in control.

This is why people will jump the latest pre-packaged box in the store, pay to have the colored carton box with the nice logo and the 2 cent slip of regular paper called “Quick Install Guide”, so that they may feel in control. It’s why some people still think vinyl records are better than CDs – “they sound more together”…when actually, they just sound “different”, and that “different” is the sound of the scratches, white noise, flutter, wow, and the compression that the medium lends to the music. We may like it, but it’s not “better” in a general sense, just different.

And the need for control comes out of one thing, and one thing only: FEAR.

This is what policitians, market strategists and other nice representatives of the human race realized long ago: If you want to get something done, strike FEAR in people – make them think they’ll burn in hell if they don’t do what they’re told. Thus we see the FUD – fear, uncertainty, and doubt – strategies of Microsoft at work – because they do work!

So, how come we hold on to vinyl records and other old stuff that “works better”, but seem to constantly grasp for new things to hold on to? More importantly, if the latest thing was really that great, how come new things are popping up all the time?

The answer is strikingly obvious – the new stuff is there to establish new markets to saturate. That is the sole reason for .NET.

Microsoft never made money from software that works. Given a choice, from a purely business perspective, what would you rather sell: An item that lasted 50 years once, or an item that lastet 5 years 10 times?

Problem with the 50-year item is, it would have to cost the consumers a fortune to pay for Microsoft employees’ salaries for 50 years, and to uphold the huge dividents the Microsoft stockholders demand. This, your average consumer cannot be asked to shell out. But paying a fraction every 5 years is entirely within the average consumer’s grasp. We see this at work in the banking world. It’s known as a “loan.” The 10 x 5-year items are much better from a logistical business perspective, but more importantly, they are a way to make you buy things you can’t afford up front, by distributing the cost (at a further cost) over a much longer period.

So, how do you establish the demand for new things every 5 years? Well, in Microsoft’s case, the answer is simple:

Write crappy software(!).

- Then tell people (the consumers) you’re “discovering” new solutions that will make their life easier (than your former product did!), when in fact, all you’re doing is inventing ways to make people dependent on fixing problems you created in the first place!

So here’s the oddest part:

The people behind Linux – and the other open source software – work the OPPOSITE way, and are driven by an entirely different set of needs: They strive to find the BEST solutions (as opposed to “most expensive”), the “truth” if you will. In this respect, they work quite like scientists, chipping away at the rocks to uncover more truth about the world.

In other words, what drives them is something which is at odds with large corporations like Microsoft; something you CAN’T BUY. Thus, from Microsoft’s perspective, something that doesn’t play the game they excel (no pun intended) at playing; the game of POWER through PURCHASE.

So, saying that big corporations selling software can benefit from supporting free, open source software, is ludicrous – that is, unless they stop selling the software and start selling services. Microsoft could do that, but that’s not nearly as profitable as sellling software. You need more employees to provide better service, and employees are, by far, the biggest expense a company has.

Compare that to spending a few billion dollars ONCE every 5 years writing a piece of software containable on a 50 cent CD, then selling 100 million copies (CDs) at $199-399 a piece. This means your investment may be, say 10 billion dollars (Microsoft quote), but your revenue is 20-40 billion. Quite nice for 5 years of work, isn’t it? And the development costs include salaries, mind you. The earnings solely benefit the stockholders.

From these figures, one would be entirely excused for asuming that our public establishment Microsoft was in fact part of the entertainment business. Hollywood does generate large revenue from the Big Ones (Titanic, The Lord Of The Rings, Star Wars, Matrix, etc.), and it does come in a slick package, with nice advertisements – sometimes years ahead of release, usually only mentioning the best parts, and pushing the merits of “award winning” and “from the makers of”, as if these same referential arguments through testemonials ever proved a thing.

But Hollywoord never generated earnings like these…

So where does it originate, this ability to generate revenues that belittle that of Google, Sun, Apple, Oracle and Adobe combined? What makes 40,000 employees generate more revenue, and thus far greater earnings, than the good 300,000 employees of IBM?

This is where the oldest of strategies comes into play:

Constantly selling the congregation (the consumers) new versions of the same old story, in ever nicer packaging, but with the same flawed innards, is the tried and true purpose of THE CHURCH. It’s NOT what open source is about, and it’s not what the ACTUAL seekers of truth – the scientists – are about.

It’s quite as Richard Dawkins so beautifully lays it out, in his books and many lectures: Is religion and science able to “work together”, co-exist? No. The goal of science is, by definition, to abolish belief and in its stead present knowledge. This means that, as science progresses, religion will have to degress.

This is precisely what we have seen over the past 400 or so years. Using referential arguments like “Newton was religious” or “Einstien said ‘God does not play dice’…” says nothing of the matter. Science will uncover, religion will always try to cover up.

Microsoft is, therefore, most easily understood as just that – an, arguable very well established, church. Watching Steve Ballmer do his stunts on stage only serves to underline this fact.

It’s “testemonials” that litter the Microsoft campaigns, not “facts”. It’s the machine of american marketing practices that forces us to believe. It’s NOT, and never will be, about the absolute truth (if such a thing exists outside of logic and mathematics). It’s about selling a product, preferably at a very high price. And I’m not talking about the price in dollars.

What Microsoft is selling is chains, cells, prisons and guards, and what we’re buying is a place in one of those prisons. Our most prized possession, our freedom – the ability to think for ourselves, to make choices for ourselves, to live our own lives, we are selling at $199 for something called “Windows”…

And if this seems as scare tactics from some lunatic fanatic (me) with the (not so) hidden agenda of persuading people to choose an alternative that allows them to retain their freedom – be it Linux, BSD, Haiku, Syllable, or any other of the many good choices available, if it seems like all I am doing is trying to create another fear in you, you should go to the local library and pick up a book or two on history, a couple on marketing, at least one on the structure and psychology of large corporations, and most importantly on evangelical organisations.

Have fun reading, and look yourself in the mirror afterwards. What you’ll see will hopefully be a representative of an intelligent species, not an ignorant excuse for a life that needs others to define its existence so desperately, that you are eager and willing to pay someone to take your freedom away from you, so that you may live happily ever after, in blissful unawareness.

.NET / Mono and C# are revolutionary software development technologies.

Apple ignored pre-emptive multi-threaded to the point it nearly destroyed their company. I don’t advise the Linux community to do the same. Linux should take the best ideas and use them without respect to their source.

Ignoring .NET/Mono is the classic “biting you nose to spite your face” response.

What are those .NET ‘adverts’ that we keep seeing from posters who defend it? There are many excellent programming frameworks, paradigms, and languages for those who are not easily deceived by marketing.

You mentioned Apple. Is OS X being built using .NET? Heck, even Vista was not built using it (and that in itself became a mockery at the time).

“Actually Microsoft paid Novell the $350 million dollars. Which is why Novell isn’t interested in backing out of the deal.

In other words, Microsoft was willing to pay Novell $350 million dollars to put a cloud over Linux and Free Software. Novell, in return has to pay a token amount for each commercial distribution sold. Novell is as happy as can be with the situation. After all, Novell can tell its customers that it has taken care of the Microsoft patent issue. So when Microsoft starts talking trash about Free Software and patents Novell can say that it has the solution.

The real problem is that Novell relies on a lot of hackers that aren’t part of Novell, and that, in many cases, actually compete against Novell. Now Novell has a deal with Microsoft that makes it look dangerous to purchase your Free Software from anyone but Novell, and that doesn’t make these third party hackers happy.

Make no mistake, Novell made out like a bandit. It received well over a quarter of a billion dollars in cash, it became the “preferred Linux vendor” for Microsoft’s sales associates, and SuSE Linux is now differentiated from all of the other Linux vendors because Novell has a patent deal with Microsoft. This differentiation has allowed Novell to snag some big clients that almost certainly would have gone with Red Hat otherwise. Novell doesn’t have even a tiny bit of buyer’s remorse. Novell just wants to be able to keep the Microsoft deal and not lose the trust of the Free Software community that it relies on for more Free Software.”

What Else is New

Principled, opinionated, self-governing individuals aren't any good for corporations looking to not only use their projects but to totally control those projects (copyleft licences such as GPL already make that hard enough for them, so it takes more time for legal 'hacks' such as software patents, "clown computing" and GitHub)

Certain groups that claim to represent the values of "Open Source" are in fact promoting the interests of Microsoft, GitHub etc. (i.e. monopoly or "open" as in a bunch of monopolies like Facebook and Microsoft sharing code snippets/resources over GitHub)

Torvalds and others who are middle-aged (or older) males are often torpedoed using weakly-backed allegations (or insinuations/innuendo) of sexism; that does not seem to matter and won't matter when they treat men the same (or worse)

Linus Torvalds was not fully canceled; nor was Richard Stallman, who's still heading the GNU Project (under conditions specified by those looking to oust him; people who code for Microsoft GitHub and many IBM employees)

General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Board of Red Hat, explains (keynote in 2011 Red Hat Summit/JBoss World) that he was introduced to the system as part of a military campaign; it basically helped war, not antiwar

Techrights examines Red Hat’s (IBM’s) hypocritical claims about the Free Software Foundation, founded by Richard Stallman back when IBM was the “big scary monopolist”; IBM employees were prominent among those pushing to oust Stallman from the GNU Project, which he founded, as well

The (in)famous letter against Richard Stallman (RMS), which was signed by many Red Hat employees with Microsoft (GitHub) accounts, doesn’t look particularly good in light of recent revelations/findings; it increasingly looks like IBM simply wants Microsoft-hosted and “permissively” licensed stuff, just like another project it announced yesterday and another that it promoted yesterday

One might not expect this from a so-called 'charity'; the Gates Foundation's critics are often met with unprecedented aggression, threats and retribution, which make one wonder if it's really a charity or a greedy cult of personalities (Bill and Melinda)

The assault on the media by Bill Gates is a subject not often explored by the media (maybe because a lot of it is already bribed by him); but we're beginning to gather new and important evidence that explains how critics are muzzled (even fired) and critical pieces spiked, never to see the light of day anywhere

Microsoft buying GitHub does not demonstrate that Microsoft loves Open Source (GitHub is not Open Source and may never be) but that it loves monopoly and coercion (what GitHub is all about and why it must be rejected)

The European Patent Office (EPO) keeps granting fake patents that cause a lot of real harm (examiners are pressured to play along and participate in this unlawful agenda); nobody is happy except those who profit from needless, frivolous lawsuits

After contributing to the cancellation of Richard Stallman (RMS) based on some falsehoods perpetuated in the media we're seeing the sort of thing one might expect from IBM (more so now that it totally controls Fedora and RHEL)